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Zombicide

Took scans of all the components and turned the board game Zombicide into a Vassal engine game. I used my Last Night on Earth vassal module and it made it a pretty quick set up of about a day to get it working online.

I’m doing this on my tablet which is fairly low res so the virtual table top is at 33% zoom level to get enough on it to be interesting. This is the tutorial set up or mission 00 out of the rule book.

If you haven’t looked at Zombicide yet and enjoyed LNoE then you may find it of interest. You can pick it up for $60’ish on Amazon, much less than the $90 SRP you’ll see it at some places or what you probably paid for it with the Kickstarter although you’d of gotten exclusive content by Kickstarting it.

The benefits of Zombicide is you can play it solo or up to 6 players without having to come up with zombie AI. Here the zombies run themselves. The rules are simple to learn but it’s definitely not a pure luck of the draw game since you can lure zombies to specific locations. Much like you can use blood lust in LNoE to ‘herd’ the zombies around.

Games can last from 20 minutes up to several hours depending on how big a map the mission calls for or the objectives of the missions.

Over time as the characters level up in experience they’re attracting more and more zombies to show up. By the time they get in the orange or red experience you might see an additional 7 walkers show up or 4 fatties who always have 2 walkers in two, that’s 12 new zombies on the board.

Also any time the zombies have two or more equal targets they split up. If there aren’t enough zombies to split evenly, you add more zombies until there are. Ouch….

Before you ask, no I cannot give you the vassal module. Or technically I can but without the images so you would have to scan your own pieces and stick them in there. That would be a violation of copyright and theft of IP etc.

The game has a couple of quirks that I’ll probably house rule fairly quickly.

1) if a survivor shoots into a zone that has other survivors and zombies the shot always hits the survivor until there are no more survivors. This is apparently a design that’s aimed (pun intended) to increase the difficulty factor. (I find it a little… let’s just say I don’t like it)

2) Infinite searching. You can search a room an infinite amount of times. This lets you avoid opening new buildings which cause a big spawn especially at higher danger levels. And it just doesn’t make much sense. Granted you can do the same thing in LNOE but typically in LNOE it’s kept in check because the heroes are underpowered compared to the zombies and have to avoid fights for the most part. In Zombicide when gear makes a HUGE difference in power, spending your time searching the same bedroom over and over again makes sense.

My kneejerk reaction to those is to use the following changes –

1) When a survivor shoots into a zone with another survivor, misses hit the survivor. This still makes guns that shoot multiple dice rolls very dangerous to use against zones. But it might mean the difference between a survivor living or dying. And has much more suspense impact, if Ned sprays some sub machine gun fire into a zone with Amy and 4 zombies and she lives? That’s much more memorable than an automatic death.

2) Limit a room to 2 searches and at that point everything good has been found. Alternatively add in “The room is searched out cards” to the game and when drawn that room can’t be searched again.

These two changes appease my sense of ‘realism’. I’ll play it stock for a game or three but I think I’ll end up using those two changes.

Unfortunately due to copyright laws etc it would be illegal to offer the files for download. You may want to check on the vassal site. I’ve noticed several games of Zombicide running in the last few weeks so others may have a module they might be willing to share.